Transference as a corrective emotional experience

Transference begins the first time we meet the therapist, or even before, in what we imagine he or she is going to be like, but we will not be aware that it is happening until our therapy is well under way. Becoming aware of transference means becoming aware that the way we are perceiving the therapist is not so much a function the therapist him or her self as of characteristics we are projecting onto him or her.

Once we do become aware of what we are doing we understand the way we relate to others, and the relationship we had with our parents and the effect it had on us, much more clearly. We come to see just how much our adult lives are shaped by attitudes we adopted in early childhood as survival strategies, and once we begin to consciously experience this in the relationship with the therapist we find ourselves changing.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

One of the reasons why the operation of transference is obscure until we learn to see it is that to a large extent the transference reproduces precisely those aspects of our emotional life of which we are not aware and whose origins we can't remember. If we could remember it there would be no need to repeat it in the transference. The saying: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' [Santayana 1905] is apropos in this context and mirrors Freud's conception of transference. We are condemned to repeat, not only in therapy but in the rest of our lives, those areas of our conditioning which we cannot recall and do not understand.

Without therapy it is difficult to recall the experiences of early childhood, especially those of the first year. But our earliest experiences can be reconstructed by working backwards from what happens in the transference and can be confirmed by the understanding of our parents' personalities which we will gain through therapy. In the manner that we found our relationship with our parents problematical we will experience our relationship with the therapist as problematical. The conditions which caused the original problem are recreated. In effect the therapist becomes a substitute parent and our unconscious experiences re-parenting in which pathological adaptation can be modified.

Transference feels real

Our unconscious creates the transference situation by perceiving in the therapist whatever it needs to find to work through its problems, but when it is happening we are no more aware that we are reacting to a situation we ourselves have created than we are when it happens in everyday life. We experience our feelings towards the therapist as genuine and justifiable, and this needs to be so for the therapeutic effect to work. If we cushion ourselves and the therapist from the full impact of our feelings by thinking to ourselves even as we speak 'this is transference' we are simply employing a defence. Real transference feels as real as, or more real than, anything else we experience:

The unconscious latches onto something the therapist actually does or says, or a characteristic he may have, as a hook for the transference, and feeling that we have a genuine grievance and tackling him in a direct personal manner is the process by which we work through our problems and eventually become free of them. We need insight to become aware that we unconsciously 'chose' to perceive the situation and react to it in that way for reasons which are inside us rather than because of the therapist's actual personality.